"Explicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two are four follows by purely logical deduction from definitions: that means that its truth results, not from the properties of objects, but from the meanings of symbols. Now symbols, in mathematics, mean what we choose; thus the feeling of self-evidence, in this case, seems explicable by the fact that the whole matter is within our control. I do not wish to assert that this is the whole truth about mathematical propositions, for the question is complicated, and I do not know what the whole truth is. But ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... contrast. In its earlier stages there can be no doubt that all such progress was thereby impeded. But it is cause for encouragement, rather than for dismay, that the slowness of Christian advance is in part historically explicable, sad as is the explanation. For against what odds had not the early missionaries to struggle! Not the heathen, but the Christian, barred the way against Christianity. Four hundred years ago the Portuguese descended upon the Hindus, cross and sword in hand. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... rut was past, the bucks no longer sought the does, the fawns had not been born, and the yearlings had left their mothers; so that each animal usually went by itself. When chased they were very apt to take to the water. This instinct of taking to the water, by the way, is quite explicable as regards both deer and tapir, for it affords them refuge against their present day natural foes, but it is a little puzzling to see the jaguar readily climbing trees to escape dogs; for ages have passed since there were in its habitat any natural foes from which it needed to ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... in its later years, not to have been a happy one. The allusions to Chaucer's personal experience of married life in both "Troilus And Cressid" and the "House of Fame" are not of a kind to be entirely explicable by that tendency to make a mock of women and of marriage, which has frequently been characteristic of satirists, and which was specially popular in an age cherishing the wit of Jean de Meung, and complacently corroborating its theories from naughty Latin fables, French fabliaux, and Italian novelle. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... think of but one motive why she should make herself instrumental in the accomplishment of my ruin. It was explicable only on the presumption that she was attached to Ijurra—that Rafael Ijurra was the lord of her heart. If so, he could easily bend it to his will—for this is but the sequence of the other—could influence ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... men trades when they had none. They learnt all this from him. The greatest miracle in history seems to me the transformation that Jesus effected in those men. Everything else in Christian or secular history, compared to it, seems easy and explicable; and it was achieved by the ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... was magnifying a fancied trouble; but the certainty that sorrow must overtake him for every indulgence of affection was a haunting shadow always attending the most trifling circumstance to set his imagination conjuring calamities. That at such times his first impulse was toward revenge is explicable; the old law, an eye for an eye, was part of his religion; and coupling it with personal pride which a thought could turn into consuming heat, how natural if, while the anticipation was doing its work, his study should be ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... is always given in Webster and other received lexicographic authorities. It is a curious fact, that, in all the school etymologies, the present indicative should have been given as the root, and is explicable only from the accident that it is the key-form in the Latin dictionaries. The change into conformity with our English dictionaries needs no defense, and will probably hereafter be imitated by ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... seemed to me clearly demonstrable; nor is the cause for the honour attaching to the Chiefs of the Mohawks and Senecas, and of the Onondagas, respectively, of commencing and closing discussion, very explicable. I believe, however, that the principle of kinship subsisting between the tribes, the Chiefs of which are thus singled out for these duties, governs, in some way, the practice adopted; and am led, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... necessary, at this late day, if you would have a chord "bite," to put a trace of acid in its sweetness. With this clue in mind, his unusual procedures become more explicable without losing ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... what by his chart was no more than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he found the incoming tide fretted here and there by black rocks, and elsewhere, in little bays, the beaches strewn with massive boulders, the high rumour of the sea-breakers in that breezy weather seemed more explicable. And still, for him, it was above all a country of appalling silence in spite of the tide thundering. Fresh from the pleasant rabble of Paris, the tumult of the streets, the unending gossip of the faubourgs that were at once his vexation and his joy, and from ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... organic beings which had previously flourished, after which, order being re-established, a new series of events was initiated. In proportion as our faith in these views grows weaker, and the phenomena of the organic or inorganic world presented to us by geology seem explicable on the hypothesis of gradual and insensible changes, varied only by occasional convulsions, on a scale comparable to that witnessed in historical times; and in proportion as it is thought possible that former fluctuations in the organic world may be due to the indefinite modifiability ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... those, myself among the number, who consider the periodicity of the solar spots, that tide of spots which flows to its maximum and then ebbs to its minimum in a little more than eleven years, as only explicable on the theory that a small comet having this period, and followed by a meteor train, has a path intersecting the sun's surface. In an article entitled 'The Sun a Bubble,' which appeared in the 'Cornhill Magazine' for October 1874, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... twenty showed no alteration of oxygen consumption as the result of cooling, nine gave a lessened consumption, while the remaining twenty-six showed an increased using up of oxygen. This diversity of result is explicable on the basis of observations made by Prof. Zuntz, who was himself experimented upon, as to his subjective heat sensations during the experiments. He found that after the first impression due to the application ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... the photograph was explicable by several surmises: zu Pfeiffer might have met Lucille at Washington, Paris, or Berlin: she might have given him the photograph or he might have bought it, or even stolen it. But—the signature "a toi, Lucille"! There lay the sting which maddened Birnier and strangled reason, ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... as he avers, really expected a party of traders at the Wisconsin, the course he now took is sufficiently explicable. If he did not expect them, his obvious course was to rejoin Tonty on the Illinois, for which he seems to have had no inclination; or to return to Canada by way of the Wisconsin, an attempt which ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... great sacrifice of Christ. There is no such pretence in the record, no such tradition among the people, not the slightest foundation whatever of any sort to warrant that arbitrary presumption. All such applications of them are rhetorical; and their historical force and moral meaning are clearly explicable on the views which we have presented in the foregoing pages, but are most violently strained and twisted by the Calvinistic theory to meet the severe exigencies of a ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... defence had spoken up for Robert, she felt hurt at his treatment of her old friend, and could only excuse it by a strong fit of conscious moodiness. His taking the curacy was only explicable, she thought, as a mode of showing his displeasure with herself, since he could not ask her to marry into Whittingtonia; but 'That must be all nonsense,' thought she; 'I will soon have him down off his high horse, and Mr. Parsons will never keep him to his engagement—silly ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... always good. We never knew a bad Irishman on the stage. Sometimes a stage Irishman seems to be a bad man—such as the "agent" or the "informer"—but in these cases it invariably turns out in the end that this man was all along a Scotchman, and thus what had been a mystery becomes clear and explicable. ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... thanks, and announced that his mind was now at ease. By some mysterious process, not clearly explicable to himself, he contrived to lay aside a portion of his dress, and to dispose himself within the folds of balmy bedclothes that awaited him. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... last livery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them these portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time; and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling creature, whom each of us may try to understand ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... an explicable contradiction of the American birthright that to some of our people the military establishment is at best a necessary evil, and military service is an extraordinary hardship rather than an inherent obligation. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... other and as utterly inexplicable and confusing as fossils are on the theory that they are special creations and are not the remains of animals that have once lived. It is the vast chaos of facts, which are explicable and fall into beautiful order on the one theory, which are inexplicable and remain a chaos on the other, which I think must ultimately force Darwin's views on any and every reflecting mind. Isolated difficulties and objections are nothing against this vast cumulative ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... mysteries of nature that men have looked upon as enigmas, until patience and research have solved them for them. Then they marvel how they could have been blind so long! Magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance have all their mystical, as well as their explicable, side. It is only because they don't readily lend themselves to the comprehension of our material nature, that we try to scoff them into the limbo of ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness imitated. But the character of the man does not lend itself to any such theory. He is quiet, practical, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... bound by the chains of righteousness. The history of all good homes is that of prosperous peoples; it can be written in two lines, and has in it nothing for literature. So, as happiness is only explicable to and by itself, these four years furnish nothing to relate which was not as tender as the soft outlines of eternal cherubs, as insipid, alas! as manna, and about as amusing as the tale ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... Ashton wrote to him from La Bourboule a letter (received on July 9th), in which he said: "To judge by the French newspapers, you are as popular in France as Pitt at the height of the great war." A note from the Memoir renders this state of feeling explicable: [Footnote: A very different current in French opinion from that of the newspapers found outlet in this letter from M. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... man and the ape is only confirmed by every advance of science, and would of itself prove the common parentage. Such minor differences as there are between man and the higher ape—in the development of the cerebrum, the number of the teeth or ribs, the distribution of the hair, and so on—are quite explicable when we reflect that the two groups must have diverged from each other more than a million ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... State, and not the "general State," that he subjects to criticism, that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation, and consequently lays down conditions which are only explicable from an uncritical confusion of political emancipation ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... cases. In general, the two most considerable bodies would unite together, while the third would revolve around their common centre of gravity. Attraction would thus become the cause of a sort of movement which would seem to be explicable ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... and maintained is explained in part by reference to the personality of Henry VII and to the circumstances that brought him to the throne. [Footnote: For the character and main achievements of Henry VII (1485-1500), see above, pp. 4 ff.] It is also explicable by reference to historical developments in England throughout the sixteenth century. [Footnote: For the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, see above, pp. 86, 97 ff., 150 ff.] As Henry VII humbled the nobility, so Henry VIII and Elizabeth ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... directly conscious, for instance, that the reason why I am now thinking of Causality, and not (say) of Tariff Reform, is the fact that I have conceived the design of delivering a course of lectures on this subject; the succession of ideas which flow through my mind as I write or speak is only explicable by reference to an end—an end which I am striving to bring into actual being. In such voluntarily concentrated purposeful successions of thought I am immediately exercising causality: and this causality does further influence ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... outlines by the great masters. They are always touched or modified by inner lines, more or less suggestive of solid form, and they are lost or accentuated in certain places, not so much in conformity with any explicable law, as in expression of the master's future purpose, or of what he wishes immediately to note in the character of the object. Most of them are irregular memoranda, not systematic elementary work: of those which are systematized, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the last edition revised by the poet, that of 1849, when she was a confirmed invalid at Rydal Mount. Those "smiles to earth unknown," had then ceased for ever. The reason why Wordsworth erased so delightful and wonderful a stanza, is to me only explicable on the supposition, that it was his sister he referred to, she who had accompanied him in former days, in so many of his "long walks in the country." His wife never did this; she had not the physical ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the exact point on which parallelism has amended materialism. We have seen that every materialist doctrine is the expression of this idea, that physical phenomena are the only ones that are determined, measurable, explicable, and scientific. This idea does wonders in the natural sciences, but is at fault when, from the physical, we pass into the moral world, and we have seen how the materialistic doctrine fails when it endeavours ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... economic ends, the laws seem to have been directed more to the encouragement than the suppression of drinking. The earliest interference with commerce in liquors appearing among the Scottish acts of parliament is very imperious and comprehensive, but not very explicable in its objects. Statutes at that time were short, and it will cost the reader little trouble to peruse that which was passed in the year 1436, and the reign of James I., 'anent Flemish wines.' 'It is statute and ordained that no man buy at Flemings ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... his young opinions were more mystical than they were now. The spot was deserted, but the door was certainly unfastened; he lifted the latch without noise, and pushing to the door behind him, stood absolutely still inside. The prevalent silence seemed to contain a faint sound, explicable as a breathing, or a sobbing, which came from the other end of the building. The floor-cloth deadened his footsteps as he moved in that direction through the obscurity, which was broken only by the faintest reflected night-light ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... and Ra; but the destruction of men by slaughter in place of drowning appears to belong to the original myth. Indeed, the only suggestion of a Deluge story is suggested by the presence of Nu, the primaeval water-god, at Ra's council, and that is explicable on other grounds. In any case the points of resemblance presented by the earlier part of the Egyptian myth to Semitic Deluge stories are general, not detailed; and though they may possibly be due to reflection ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... logical escape from this conclusion. He saw that belief on the part of the early Christians in the miraculous nature of Christ's Resurrection was explicable, without any supposition of miracle. The explanation lay under the eyes of anyone who chose to take a moderate degree of trouble; it had been put before the world again and again, and there had been no serious attempt ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... beginning of Christ's manhood is spoken of in terms which are only explicable, if it was a second form of being, preceded by a pre-existent form, and was assumed by His own act. The language, too, demands that that humanity should have been true essential manhood. It was in 'the form' of man and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... said that, to my perception, the most characteristic mark in Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... bailiff got away from Grizzie, and made at him, calling to the mastiff. But the dog, only half recovered from the effects of Cosmo's blow, either mistaking through bewilderment, or moved by some influence ill explicable, instead of attacking Cosmo, rushed at his master. Rage recalls dislike, and it may be he remembered bygone irritations and teasings. His lordship, however, suddenly became aware of his treacherous intent, and in a moment his legs had SAVED THEMSELVES over wall, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... very explicable on any principles, as a detail not visible without search was sought and verified, and that by a habitual mocker at anything out of the common way. For example, Hone published a comic explanation, correct or not, of ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... objects what is called the Natural System; and which is foundation of distinction of true and adaptive characters{148}. Now this wonderful fact of hand, hoof, wing, paddle and claw being the same, is at once explicable on the principle of some parent-forms, which might either be or walking animals, becoming through infinite number of small selections adapted to various conditions. We know that proportion, size, shape of bones and ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... miserable, undone, and dependent a person as the Nabob of Oude than those of the Governor-General of Bengal, which might be paid either on the receipt of the Benares revenue, or at the seat of his power, and of the Company's exchequer. Besides, it is not explicable, upon any grounds that can be avowed, why the Nabob, who could afford to give these bills as a present to Mr. Hastings, could not have equally given them in discharge of the debt which he owed to the Company. It is, indeed, very much to be feared that the people of India find it sometimes turn ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "Writers to the Signet"—a species of beatified solicitor holding a position so esteemed, so enviable, and so intensely reputable that the only scandal previously whispered in connection with a member of this class proved innocently explicable upon the discovery that he was affianced to the lady's aunt. The building in which the firm had their office formed one end of an austere range of dark stone houses overlooking a street paved with cubes of granite and confronted by a precisely similar line ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... at another. The most immediately destructive consequences of individual reasoning on a limited scale, murder and suicide, have been successively regarded as heroic acts, as criminal deeds, and as the deplorable but explicable actions of irresponsible beings in consecutive ages of violence, strict law and humanitarianism. It seems to be believed that the combination of murder and suicide is more commonly observed under the last of the three reigns than it was under the first; it was ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... spot upon the east end of the island presented a phenomenon which seemed not easily explicable by any known laws of that class of natural history to ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... other phaenomena are consequences of the affections of other beings, more or less like itself. And having thus good evidence for believing that many of the most interesting occurrences about it are explicable on the hypothesis that they are the work of intelligences like itself—having discovered a vera causa for many phaenomena—why should the child limit the application of so fruitful an hypothesis? The dog ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not in words explicable, with what divine lines and lights the exercise of godliness and charity will mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... images,—stick, fire, water, cow, and the rest; but the wonder enters with the fact that these usually inanimate or dumb objects of nature enter so humanly into the contest of wills. So it is, also, with the doings of the three little pigs. Every image is explicable to the youngest hearer, while none suggests actual familiarity, because the actors are not children, but pigs. Simplicity, with mystery, is the keynote of all the pictures, and these are clear ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... necessary from a strategic point of view, one connecting Petersburg with Wasa via Hiitola, Nyslott and Iyvaeskylae. Barracks were built or ordered in Fredrikshamn, Kouvala, Lahtis and other Finnish towns, or railway centres. All these precautions, however, are not only explicable without the theory that Sweden and Norway are to be invaded, but they ought to have been adopted long ago, say unprejudiced military authorities, in the interests of Russia's home defence. Yet M. Sven Hedin concluded his argument with the words: "When it has been further ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... hospitals thirty years back, together with striking professional anecdotes then gathered. Whereupon cards followed, with aunt Kimble's annual failure to follow suit, and uncle Kimble's irascibility concerning the odd trick which was rarely explicable to him, when it was not on his side, without a general visitation of tricks to see that they were formed on sound principles: the whole being accompanied by a strong steaming ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... experimented on humanity in the person of the son he loved as his life, and at once, when the experiment appeared to have failed, all humanity's failings fell on the shoulders of his son. Richard's parting laugh in the train—it was explicable now: it sounded in his ears like the mockery of this base nature of ours at every endeavour to exalt and chasten it. The young man had plotted this. From step to step Sir Austin traced the plot. The curious mask he had worn since his illness; the selection of his incapable uncle Hippias for a companion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... those finite compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter, with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more conscious and intelligent will. Irrelevance is not irrelevant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... which now happens must be consistent with the attributes of the Deity, if such a Being exists, Evolution must be consistent with those attributes. And, if so, the evolution of the universe, which is neither more nor less explicable than that of a chicken, must also be consistent with them. The doctrine of Evolution, therefore, does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... by sympathy discovered, it is not in words explicable with what divine lines and light the exercise of godliness and charity will mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... transferred into Greek, as is proved by the synonymous [Greek: dounai ten psuchen hautou] in Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28.—2. The fact that the same uncommon expression occurs not fewer than five times in the same discourse of Christ, and that so intentionally and emphatically, is explicable only when it was thereby intended to point to an important fundamental passage of the Old Testament.—3. In the discourses of our Lord, the expression is, no less than in the passage before us, used of His sacrificial death.—If, then, it be established ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... rites of the old religion, the people invented legend as a substitute for the folklore of all the little gods condemned by the Church; so that the fairy tale is in all Europe the link between Christianity and paganism, and to the weakness of vanquished Rome her departed empire seemed only explicable as the result of magic. The Capitol, in the imagination of such tales, became a tower of wizards. High above all, a golden sphere reflected the sun's rays far out across the distant sea by day, and at night a huge lamp took ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... continues, "find instinct making mistakes." Passing over the fact that instinct is again personified, the statement is still incorrect. Instinctive actions are certainly, as a general rule, performed with less uncertainty than deliberative ones; this is explicable by the fact that they have been more often practised, and thus reduced more completely to a matter of routine; but nothing is more certain than that animals acting under the guidance of inherited experience or instinct frequently make mistakes ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... and importance than the sound called forth by the ten fingers of a person quite unacquainted with music running his fingers over the keys of an instrument. The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, "as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid." All the peculiarities of dream life are explicable as the incoherent effort, due to some physiological stimulus, of certain organs, or of the cortical elements ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... complete puzzle for twenty years. Mr. Bates, when first describing them, suggested that they might be due to some form of parallel variation dependent on climatic influences; and I myself adduced other cases of coincident local modifications of colour, which did not appear to be explicable by any form of mimicry.[106] But we neither of us hit upon the simple explanation given by ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... her vague sufferings, nor of the actual pains she now felt in her head. The origin of her cousin's present anger was the non-revelation of Brigaut's arrival. With Breton obstinacy Pierrette was determined to keep silence,—a resolution that is perfectly explicable. It is easy to see how her thoughts turned to Brigaut, fearing some danger for him if he were discovered, yet instinctively longing to have him near her, and happy in knowing he was in Provins. What joy to have ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... striking." Very striking, indeed; for, "of the seven, five agree verbally with the text of St. Matthew or St. Luke, exhibiting, indeed, three slight various readings not elsewhere found, but such as are easily explicable. The sixth is a condensed summary of words related by St. Matthew; the seventh alone presents an important variation in the text of a verse, which is, however, otherwise very uncertain" (pp. 130, 131. The italics are our own). That is, there are only seven distinct quotations, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... elementary particles of the opposite kind in opposite directions, but parallel to the current. Even the differences between common and voltaic electricity, when applied to effect chemical decomposition, which Dr. Wollaston has pointed out[A], seem explicable by the circumstances connected with the induction of electricity from these two sources (25.). But as I have reserved this branch of the inquiry, that I might follow out the investigations contained in the present paper, I refrain (though much tempted) from ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... noticing that, though natural selection is scientifically explicable, variation is not. Thus far the cause of variation, or the reason why the offspring is sometimes unlike the parents, is just as mysterious as the reason why it is generally like the parents. It is now as inexplicable ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... seen varies with the relation to the body in certain ways that we regard as natural and explicable. When I am near it, the visual experience is not just what it is when I recede from it. But how can I know that I am near the desk or far from it? What do these expressions mean? Their full meaning will become clearer ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... Catanzaro, an average white man will seldom find, in any Calabrian hostelry, what he is accustomed to consider as ordinary necessities of life. The thing is easily explicable. These men are not yet in the habit of "handling" civilized travellers; they fail to realize that hotel-keeping is a business to be learnt, like tailoring or politics. They are still in the patriarchal stage, wealthy proprietors for the most part, and quite independent of your ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... islands are generally very constant. When they extend to many islands, considerable variability appears; and when they have an extensive range over a large part of the Archipelago, the amount of unstable variation is very large. These facts are explicable on Mr. Darwin's principles. When a species exists over a wide area, it must have had, and probably still possesses, great powers of dispersion. Under the different conditions of existence in various portions of its ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... matter, but the thought of the blue appealed to my sense of the congruous ridiculous. I was more than content with the result. Why a blue cat should be more mirth-provoking than a yellow may not be explicable, but the fact remains. Even Mary 'Liza shrank from contact with the absurd object, and the moisture condensed ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... of two hundred yards from the base he paused astounded. Why anything of the tower remained at all was a mystery, explicable only by reason of the skeleton-like character of its construction. All about it the surface had been rent as by an earthquake, and save for a fragment of the dome or bombproof all trace of buildings had disappeared. A glistening ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... seem, they are in accordance with actual experience in all branches of art. The fact is that the pleasures which art gives us are complex in the extreme. We are always disposed to dwell on such of their elements as are explicable and can in some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, non-moral, and non-intellectual, and which render most of our attempted explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to be practically ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... and long pollen is generally on the 7 : 1 : 1 : 7 {97} basis, but in some cases it may be on the 15 : 1 : 1 : 15 basis. But though the intensity of the coupling may vary it varies in an orderly way. If A and B are the two factors concerned, the results obtained in F2 are explicable on the assumption that the ratio of the four sorts of gametes produced is a term of ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... world. Between 1870 and 1890 the production of gold fell off while its use as money increased greatly, and prices fell. A great increase of gold production has occurred in the period since 1890. In part the rising prices since 1897 are explicable as the periodic upswing of confidence and credit, but in the main doubtless they are due to the stimulus of increasing gold supplies.[10] These are but a few of many instances in monetary history, which, taken together, make an argument of probability ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... explicable but unexplained. The most formidable men are her friends, and why? Nobody dares to fathom the mystery. Then is this ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the expropriated—as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building and development that had surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Liedenbrock; until now particular conditions of non-conducting rocks, electricity and magnetism, had tempered the laws of nature, giving us only a moderately warm climate, for the theory of a central fire remained in my estimation the only one that was true and explicable. Were we then turning back to where the phenomena of central heat ruled in all their rigour and would reduce the most refractory rocks to the state of a molten liquid? I feared this, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... disguise was the one thing she suspected and could not tolerate. It may be questioned whether she ever deceived herself; but it must be said, that on the whole she flattered weakness—and excused, by enchanting eloquence, much which cannot always be justified merely on the ground that it is explicable. But to explain was something—all but everything at the time of her appearance in literature. Every novel she wrote made for charity—for a better acquaintance with our neighbour's woes and our own egoism. Such an attitude of mind is only possible to an absolutely frank, even Arcadian, nature. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... have occasionally formed a low island, which has shortly been washed away by the waves. Knowing as we do that volcanoes abound on the sea floor, the question why we do not oftener see their explosions disturbing the surface of the waters is very interesting, but not as yet clearly explicable. It is possible, however, that a volcanic discharge taking place at the depth of several thousand feet below the surface of the water would not be able to blow the fluid aside so as to open a pipe to the surface, but would expend ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... his least attractive posture. His comparative promptitude in accepting Mancio as patrono, his unwillingness to abide by his choice, his sudden hostility to Mancio, his final acceptance of Mancio, are all explicable variations. Nevertheless they showed a disregard for superficial consistency which might easily be misinterpreted as caprice. The bias of the court had been veering away from the prisoner for some time. His series of actions ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... silence with his curious metallic clack, and others quickly joined the chorus, keeping up their strange music till morning. Like many Batrachians, this has a voice singularly unlike that of any other organised creature. The cries of beasts, birds, and insects are all explicable to our senses, and we can recognise most of them as belonging to such or such an order of animal; but the voices of many frogs are like nothing else, and allied species utter totally dissimilar noises. In some, as this, the sound is like the concussion of metals; in others, of the vibration ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... horseback within half-a-dozen yards of him. The certainty of the thought cramped his muscles. For the rest, it became clear to him that the attempt of the millionaire connoisseur to carry off Vittoria had received the tacit sanction of the Austrian authorities; for reasons quite explicable, Mr. Pericles, as the English lady called him, distinctly hinted it, while affirming with vehement self-laudation that his scheme had succeeded ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was of interest concerning these twain in their relation to her. Their influence upon her life is explicable alone by the nature of her longings. Time was when both represented for her all that was most potent in earthly success. They were the personal representatives of a state most blessed to attain—the titled ambassadors of comfort ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... pathologically, between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to Death's door by his fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which had impressed me the night before with a moment's belief in a sound and a spectre,—me who, thanks to sublime education, went so quietly to sleep a few minutes after, convinced hat ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... conceive Maimonides to insist upon if he were living to-day. Mechanical necessity as a universal explanation of phenomena would exclude free will and the efficacy of prayer as ordinarily understood, though not necessarily miracles, if we mean by miracle simply an extraordinary phenomenon not explicable by the laws of nature as we know them, and happening only on rare occasions. But in reality this is not what we mean by miracle. A miracle is a discontinuity in the laws of nature brought to pass on a special occasion by a personal being in response to a prayer or in order to realize a given ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... familiar with a "variety" actress. Certainly, as she knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though, of course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if necessary, the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was purely as a series of special cases, of explicable accidents. Not that he cared; if it were a part of the Boston character to be inquiring, he would be to the last a courteous Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as much as she liked; he didn't care how much he told her that the old ideas in the South were played out. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the rise of pressure observed by Mr. Ferranti and Mr. Kapp could be due to resonance. Mr. Kapp's experiment was not conclusive, for the length of spark is not an accurate measure of electromotive force. As regards Mr. Mordey's observation, he thought the action explicable on the theory of the leading condenser current acting on the field magnets. The same explanation is also applicable to the Deptford case, for when the dynamo is direct on, the condenser current is about 10 amperes, and this exerts ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... phenomena of stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds of Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on natural grounds—what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having become mesmerism or hypnotism in ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... fix in the student's mind a true conception of {231} the essential differences in substance, which, ultimately, depend wholly on their pleasantness to human perception, and offices for human good; and not at all on any otherwise explicable structure or faculty. It is of no use to determine, by microscope or retort, that cinnamon is made of cells with so many walls, or grape-juice of molecules with so many sides;—we are just as far as ever from understanding why these particular interstices should be aromatic, and these special ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Perhaps such evidence would be adduced to her that she could have no choice but to judge and condemn him. Gilbert Grail had thought him infamous; perhaps Annabel would hesitate as little. She would have remarked a strangeness in his manner to her, explicable now. Believing, how she must scorn him! How those beautiful eyes of hers would speak in one glance of cold contempt, if ever he passed beneath them! She might take the nobler part; she might hold it incredible till she had a confession from his ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... possible), and which are exposed to strong currents, is far from being an improbable event; and the several stages, from close relation to entire isolation in the atolls of the Maldiva Archipelago, are readily explicable. ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... name from the Acts of Patrick is a negative argument. It is explicable perhaps by the supposed irregularity of Declan's preaching. Declan was certainly earlier than Mochuda and yet there is no reference to him in the Life of the latter saint. Ailbhe however is referred to in the Tripartite Life of Patrick and the cases of Ailbhe and Declan are "a pari"; the ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... out of the fight, though Persano signaled desperately to them to enter the engagement and "surround the enemy rear." With his remaining ironclads Persano formed three divisions of three ships each and swung across the enemy's bows in line ahead. Just at the critical moment, and for no very explicable motive, he shifted his flag from the Re d'Italia in the center to the Affondatore, which was steaming alone on the starboard side of the line. The change was not noted by all his ships, and thus caused confusion of orders. The delay involved also left ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... exterminated. And if we consider further that the necessity for taking out a license in India can inflict no greater slur than is cast on the English in England by their having to take out gun licenses, it is evident that the vehemently expressed desire for the repeal of this Act is only explicable when read along with the previously quoted remarks with reference to the native volunteering and the armed population in sympathy with them at their back, and with the detonating matter which appears in those seditious pamphlets to which I ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... these two varieties together, and they did not spontaneously cross; and this, considering that the plants are monoecious and abound with pollen, and are well known generally to cross freely, seems explicable only on the belief that these two varieties are in some degree mutually infertile. The hybrid plants raised from the above five seed were intermediate in structure, extremely variable, and perfectly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... to the end, all such are agreed. That it is a duty, they are satisfied. As to the means, there can be but little if any variety of opinion that can greatly perplex; and as to the manner, information abundant and easily explicable is found in the Scriptures. If the duty of Covenanting is obligatory on an individual, on a church, or on a nation, it is incumbent on the members of a Bible Society in their associate capacity. "The Lord gave ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... have become a she-bear, and later a star; and the Brauronian Artemis, whose maiden ministers danced a bear-dance,(2) are goddesses whose legend seems unnatural, and needs to be made intelligible. Or, again, there is nothing not explicable and natural in the conception of the Olympian Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god who "turns everywhere his shining eyes, and beholds all things, and protects the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... inhabitants of the cities, at least, of the West. The founders of these cities are so largely men of Eastern birth, the means of their expansion are so largely advanced by Eastern capitalists, that this tendency is easily explicable. [So far as my observation went it was to Boston rather than to New York or Philadelphia that the educated classes of the Western cities looked as the cynosure of their eyes. Boston seemed to stand for something less material than these other cities, and the subtler nature of its influence ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... to. Stafford and Lois loved each other—with a love which was all too natural and explicable in the light of our present knowledge. It was necessary that he should be made aware that marriage between them was impossible—that they were, in fact, the ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... approbation and really good, who that has ever had a dog of his own will deny that animals are capable of such actions? Mr. Mivart indeed says:—"It may be safely affirmed, however, that there is no trace in brutes of any actions simulating morality which are not explicable by the fear of punishment, by the hope of pleasure, or by personal affection" (p. 221). But it may be affirmed, with equal truth, that there is no trace in men of any actions which are not traceable to the same motives. If a ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... procession, of which the central figure was identical with that familiar to us at Coventry. But such a procession, terminating in a sacred feast, would have had no meaning if the naked lady represented a creature merely of flesh and blood. It is only explicable on the hypothesis that she was the goddess of a heathen cult, such as Hertha (or Nerthus), whose periodical progress among her subject tribes is described in a well-known passage by Tacitus,[57] and yet survives, as we have seen, in the folklore ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... difficult to see why such a fact should be suppressed. If the charge against him was at last dismissed, because the accusers did not think it worth while to come to Rome to prosecute it, St. Luke's silence is more explicable. In any case, we may regard it as almost certain that St. Paul ended his life under a Roman axe during the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... forward to the time when historical science will become entirely quantitative. The actions of prominent individuals, which are generally considered to have altered or determined the course of things, are obviously not amenable to statistical computation or explicable by general laws. Thinkers like Buckle sought to minimise their importance ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... explicable, and it was hardly possible to quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts, furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the French eastern frontier. And this ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... national pride should follow so many disasters by land is explicable only through the battle of New Orleans, whose crowning victory changed the aspect of prior engagements in the public memory, while it placed a new value on the marksmanship of the American soldiery. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... conduct of a case there are rules analogous to those which distinguish between honourable and dishonourable war, but they are less clearly defined and less universally accepted. In criminal prosecutions a remarkable though very explicable distinction is drawn between the prosecutor and the defender. It is the etiquette of the profession that the former is bound to aim only at truth, neither straining any point against the prisoner nor keeping back any fact which is favourable to him, nor using any argument which he does not ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... in a moment; and with more joy than disappointment found that we were directly under the passage, in a square space without any opening. Not a door nor a window, nor any explicable purpose for this sort of closed vestibule. Why was there a staircase leading into a blind space? Why was there a strong padlocked door shutting off ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... espousal, estrange, ethereal, eulogistic, euphonious, evanescent, evangelical, evict, exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, explicit, expunge, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... quickly after being moved." Jagadis smiled happily as he recounted the life-saving maneuver. "Graphs of my delicate apparatus have proved that trees possess a circulatory system; their sap movements correspond to the blood pressure of animal bodies. The ascent of sap is not explicable on the mechanical grounds ordinarily advanced, such as capillary attraction. The phenomenon has been solved through the crescograph as the activity of living cells. Peristaltic waves issue from a cylindrical tube which extends down ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... good of other animals, but that each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others;—that the canon in natural history, of "Natura non facit saltum," is applicable to instincts as well as to corporeal structure, and is plainly explicable on the foregoing views, but is otherwise inexplicable,—all tend to corroborate the theory of ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... lying on the white pillow and turned toward the door, with the eager expression which her waiting for me had given it. Neither of us spoke for some seconds, and when we did speak we took refuge in commonplaces. Our hearts were too full—mine with a sudden and hardly explicable overflow of affection toward this beautiful being whom I had saved from dying; hers with a like affection for me, heightened a thousand fold by the intense love of love and of living that filled her whole soul and made her gratitude to me partake almost of the nature of ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Where was he this night? The sense of impending disaster gave strength to her, however. She rose and put her hand on Willy's arm as he walked to and fro across the earthen floor. She was the more drawn to him from some scarce explicable sense of his weakness. ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... rationalist in the mystic's attitude is his propensity to see mysteries where there are none and to fail to see those that we cannot possibly escape. In declaring that one is not a mystic, one makes no claim to be able to explain everything, nor does he maintain that all things are explicable in scientific terms. ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... for the following, among other, conclusions.[821] Mercury rotates synchronously with its revolution—that is, once in 88 days—on an axis sensibly perpendicular to its orbital plane. No certain signs of a Mercurian atmosphere are visible. The globe is seamed and furrowed with long narrow markings, explicable as cracks in cooling. It is, and always was, a dead world. From micrometrical measures, moreover, the inferences were drawn that the planet's mass has a probable value about 1/20 that of the earth, while its mean density falls considerably ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... old, since the words of which they are composed are in many cases not retained in the colloquial tongue, in which they must once have been included, and are in some instances lost from the language altogether, so much so as to be only partially explicable even by scholars. The argument applies likewise, in their degree, to camps, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when practice ceases—the strengthening of passions habitually gratified, and the weakening of those habitually curbed—the development of every faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual, according to the use made of it—are all explicable on this same principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific differences: an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... or defacement. But with the outburst of Calvinism all those affected were inflamed with a positive hatred of the beautiful in art. If this had been confined to the destruction of images to which idolatrous worship was offered, it would be explicable and justifiable, but it extended to the most innocuous objects. Delicate tracery such as adorns the west front of the church of Vendome, a lace-work of beautiful sculpture representing trailing roses and vines, birds and reptiles, was ruthlessly hacked. Churches, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... from obsession, the hypnotizer using the brain and body of his subject as though they were his own. All unconsciously to himself, he has called into play four-dimensional mechanics. Many cases of so-called dual personality are more easily explicable as possession by an alien will than on the less credible hypothesis that the character, habits, and language of a person can change utterly ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... vulnerability. The peroneal element is of course somewhat the more exposed, as lying posterior; but it seems unreasonable to assume that so large a proportion of the injuries can implicate the posterior segment of the nerve as to make the startling difference in the incidence of degeneration explicable. In this relation we may bear in mind that the muscles supplied by this nerve suffer most in the degeneration subsequent to anterior polio-myelitis, and again that in cerebral hemiplegia or spinal-cord ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... upon the landlady and the two labourers. In all essential things we and the Gilliards cut very much the same figure in the alehouse kitchen. M. Hector was more at home, indeed, and took a higher tone with the world; but that was explicable on the ground of his driving a donkey-cart, while we poor bodies tramped afoot. I daresay the rest of the company thought us dying with envy, though in no ill sense, to be as far up in the profession ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
